KDE 3.2 and aRts

[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 10:56:11AM -0500, George Staikos wrote:
> How about we don't require arts at all?

I think its very convenient for media players and media applications to be
able to depend on some basic functionality being always provided, at least
in terms of APIs. This is why I am working hard on obsoleting aRts in the
sense of having an own aRts process that always runs.

On the other hand, it should be fairly convenient for media players, web
browsers (and so on), to be able to call some function in the code which
plays a sample and/or sounds ; without checking at compile time whether the
API is present or not. Thats why I'd like to keep an depedancy to the IDL
compiler, for writing and implementing own components, and for binding them
to programming languages.

However, one could probably make having the implementation of aRts optional
(whereas having the interface would still be mandatory), and applications can
then check at runtime whether an artsd implementation exists, where they can
always rely on that an aRts interface exists.

Thus the lines

  Arts::Synth_PLAY p;
  if (p.isNull()) {
    // handle missing component
  }
  else {
    // works.
  }

could perform a run-time check. Still due to portability issues, I could
imagine using glib would solve some issues in the aRts code, which are
for instance in the select() code.

Anyway, for KDE3.2 I think remaining backward compatible to KDE3.0 is a quite
important goal, which I'd like to achieve.

   Cu... Stefan
-- 
  -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan at space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
     KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-